ITHACA, N.Y. — Matt Rosenbloom-Jones was appointed as the general manager of Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit (TCAT) on Friday.
Rosenbloom-Jones was hired at TCAT in January as its service development manager, and was named acting general manager six weeks ago when TCAT’s former general manager, Scot Vanderpool, retired in March. TCAT’s Board of Directors unanimously voted to put Rosenbloom-Jones at the helm of the Ithaca area’s challenged transit organization.
TCAT has faced many of the same hurdles that transit providers across the U.S. were dealt during the pandemic. Bus parts became scarce causing a backlog in repairs, drivers and other staff has shrunk, and TCAT became an early adopter of electric buses, manufactured by the company Proterra, which proved to be unreliable and impossible to repair after Proterra went bankrupt.
TCAT is still committed to transitioning to an “emissions-free” bus fleet, but the organization recently opted to purchase five new diesel buses in order to prioritize improving its service reliability.
Rosenbloom-Jones said in an interview that addressing all the issues impacting TCAT’s service will be a challenge, but convincing people to ride the bus is not one of them. He said he sees a strong demand for service, and a transit agency that punches above its weight.
“We’re not like a lot of other transit systems where we have to try to sell ourselves to gain ridership. The ridership is there,” Rosenbloom-Jones, said. “The more service we put out, the more ridership will generate. It’s just a matter of meeting the demand.”
Rosenbloom-Jones compared TCAT to the Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky (TANK), where he used to work. TANK, which serves a population of over 1.6 million, ran about 1.5 million passenger trips in 2022 while operating almost twice as many bus routes as TCAT, according to figures reported by the Federal Transit Administration.
TCAT serves a population of about 54,000 and ran just over 2.5 million passenger trips in 2022. Rosenbloom-Jones credited TCAT’s comparatively large volume of service to the local student population, and a lack of parking that incentivizes commuters to ride the bus.
While the service TCAT currently provides compares well against other transit organizations, it falls short of the level offered before the pandemic. In 2019, TCAT ran about 4.3 million passenger trips.
Rosenbloom-Jones said that during the pandemic, TCAT became reactive and the focus became just “keeping the service running and keeping the lights on.” Now on the other side of the pandemic, Rosenbloom-Jones said he wants to overhaul TCAT’s fleet management plan and capital improvement plans.
“That means replacing assets when they are getting too old, finding funding to replace them, sunsetting them out of the system, but also plans for how we care for and maintain the assets so that we can have reliable, regular service,” Rosenbloom-Jones said.
TCAT’s board of directors were impressed with the plans Rosenbloom-Jones discussed in his interview for the general manager job.
“That’s the kind of planning that an organization like this needs. He’s on it. He’s only been here three months and he came up with this. This is what I mean. He’s a real strategic thinker,” said TCAT Board of Directors Chair and Tompkins County Legislator Deborah Dawson.
Chris Barner, a transportation supervisor with 15 years spent working at TCAT, said he was quickly impressed by Rosenbloom-Jones when he started working for TCAT in January as its service development manager.
“We needed someone with his knowledge to help change things, and he’s the guy to do it. That’s how I feel,” Barner said.
Restoring service to pre-pandemic levels will require TCAT to staff up amid a tight labor market. In 2019, TCAT was staffed by about 90 drivers. TCAT’s Human Resources department reported at TCAT’s March board of directors meeting that TCAT has 62 full-time bus operators, of which 48 are available, and four part-time bus operators.
The management team at TCAT has also experienced high turnover in the last year. In the last year, TCAT has cycled through two assistant general managers, a controller, and two human resources managers. The controller and human resources manager positions are filled, but the two assistant general manager positions remain unfilled, confirmed TCAT Communications and Marketing Manager Patty Poist.
Rosenbloom-Jones said the management team TCAT currently has is “extremely dedicated.” He framed management’s job as support for the drivers and mechanics at TCAT, the staff that provides the transit service. “That’s really the mission here, is just to get vehicles on the road to pick people up to move them around, and I think everybody’s pushing in the same direction,” Rosenbloom-Jones said.
He said he intends to push forward with a big service expansion for the Fall.
“It’s an all hands on deck approach right now to just do everything we can to get back to where we were pre-COVID,” Rosenbloom-Jones said. “That means aggressively hiring, aggressively repairing the vehicles, doing everything we can just to put as much service on the road as possible.”